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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Facebook leads to marriage for couple whose love never died

By David McElroy · December 31, 2015

Reunited couple

When James got a Facebook message from Wendy in 2013, he didn’t know what to think. More than 20 years after a nasty high school breakup, he was afraid she was still angry with him.

James and Wendy were high school sweethearts in Forest Lake, Minn., a small town about half an hour north of Minneapolis. They fell in love and seemed to have a strong relationship. Then Wendy got pregnant but lost the baby.

While she was in the hospital, a friend told her lies about James — that he was cheating on her and that he had told people she had had a coat-hanger abortion. By the time she got out, the angry young teen wanted nothing to do with James. She wouldn’t listen to his denials.

They graduated from high school together in 1991 and then went their separate ways. They both married other people. James spent years in the military. Wendy had three daughters and ended up in Alabama. By 2013, though, each was alone. That’s when Wendy sent James that Facebook message.

Wendy told him that she would be in Minnesota for a visit and she wanted to see him while she was there. James said he didn’t know what she might want — “Maybe she still wanted to tell me off,” he said — and he turned her down without much of an explanation.

James was still in the military at the time and was about to be deployed again, but by the next year, he was getting out of the military and was back in Minnesota.

For some reason, Wendy didn’t give up. She sent him another Facebook message. She was going to be visiting family again — and she still wanted to see him.

James agreed this time.

He said he didn’t know what to expect from Wendy. He had heard of people seeing one another again after years and being disappointed. The reunion with Wendy was nothing like that, though.

James and Wendy had a lot to talk about — about the past and about everything that had happened since then. Bad weather conditions during her visit to Minnesota meant her return flight was delayed by four days, so they had far more time together than they had expected.

They had long enough together to realize their love had never died.

James visited her in Alabama not long after that. Then she and her daughters spent more time in Minnesota with him. It wasn’t too long before the high school sweethearts admitted they were in love all over again, so James moved to Alabama to marry the love of his life.

I talked with James Thursday when I went to an auto parts store to buy a battery. As he installed the new battery in my car, I asked him where he was from. His accent made me suspect it was somewhere in the Upper Midwest. So he told me his story.

Moving from Minnesota to Alabama was a bit of culture shock for James, but he said it’s the best thing he’s ever done.

“I never quit loving her and she never quit loving me,” he said. “We both needed each other. Even though we had married other people and tried to have other lives, she was always the one.”

James wished me a happy new year and I thanked him for sharing his story.

As I drove away, I had a renewed sense of optimism. If love is real, maybe it doesn’t die. If their love can survive all that time and all that distance apart, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us — even me.

For some people, real love sits hidden away in the heart, locked away from public view. How many people still love each other, but haven’t been willing to do anything about it?

What if Wendy had never found James on Facebook? What if she had taken his first no?

Real love doesn’t have to die — but it can’t live openly and flourish until we’re willing to take risks and make love a priority. Maybe there’s hope for us after all. Who knows?

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Briefly

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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